Blue Note by Tracy Panepinto
Ethan follows his nose to a mysterious and magical jazz gathering.
In the beginning there was the night-blooming Nicotiana. Before Gabriella; before Apex and the Jazz Cat; before the cool, cajoling just a little longer and the hours that slipped between minutes spent contemplating Thelonious. Before our numbers grew and we realized our strength; long before we sat as Olympians drunk on our own beauty and power, driven by a dissonance begging atonement - before any of that, there was the flower.
Nicotiana drifted into the night time city on a spectral breeze. The bewitching aroma crept over lawns, down alleyways and stole into houses and apartments until it found me in my bed and stirred me awake. Enchanted, I got up, dressed, and followed it out into the night. I left my safe neighborhood and journeyed down side streets I had no business taking - such was Nicotiana's spell. I passed under broken streetlights and by burned-out houses, gravel and broken glass crunching under the soles of my shoes. I crossed vacant lots and under roadways before emerging in the rows of warehouses lining the waterfront.
I wasn't the first to arrive. Cornell, Zero, Lanie, the Hawker - all strangers at the time - slipped before me into the warehouse through an alley-side door left ajar. About two dozen people came that first night, and like me, most clung to hipster roots in style and mind. We milled around the space, anticipating, somehow knowing even then that we were both on the cusp of and central to something new and unimagined.
Feeling the momentum of the group, I took stock of my surroundings. Graffiti covered the lower third of thirty-foot walls. Paint cans, rags, vape cartridges and needles littered the floor. As I remember it now, it was a makeshift riser that served as a stage set against the backdrop of an overhead door. Several tables and chairs were unaccountably strewn across the cement floor. It certainly didn't look the kind place where miracles would happen. It didn't look like much at all. But everything changed with the first whisperings of a standup bass. In unison, we all felt the tickle of those first notes and turned to acknowledge their origin.
The Jazz Cat came in unnoticed, seemingly materialized on the riser when we weren't looking. And he was cool. No other word to describe him - Cool. Round green shades rested mid-point on his nose, open vest over button-down shirt, dreads to his shoulders, and that beautiful, well-worn bass. Come from nowhere, he owned that stage. And he belonged to it. We felt it instantly. He was the Jazz Cat and he existed for us to exist for him. A strange symbiosis at work - or play. The Cat laid down a beat that was at once so easy and so intense that no one took notice of how the space around us changed. The Cat played, indifferent to the surroundings. He played because it was in him, because it was his nature to coax those strings according to some unseen score alive in his fingertips and soul.
But not everyone was a Listener. Some, confused as to why they were there, shifted around, nervous, not digging the vibe, not syncing with the tones. Even knowing the flower, some never did fit, and the music sifted them out, exposed them and sent them on their way. Nicotiana, maybe, took them back to their beds. In the morning the night just a barely remembered strange dream.
That first night I sat with Cornell and Lanie at a table pulled up front and we listened to the Cat conjure up pizzicato spells. "Ethan," I introduced myself. The air around us pulsed with sound.
"You play?" Cornell asked, passing me a cart.
"I listen."
"I play," he said, barely taking his eyes off the stage. "Lanie, too," He nodded at the pretty blonde with him. "Clarinet, a little sax. I tried the bass but it didn't take." He smiled in appreciation. "Dude is wicked-good." Thus, the Cat cast his spell and our worlds began anew with the buzz and slap of an unfretted bass, our lives previous being of little consequence.
Immersed in the sound, I was only starting to notice how the graffiti shifted, glowed a richer hue - a physical change beginning - when the music ended and everything went gray. Cat packed up. He was done for the evening. Time for us to follow the flower back to bed. And we did. That was how it began.
I never was particularly adamant about memories, realizing early on that the then was always imbued with the now. Did that make it easier to go where Nicotiana led? Perhaps susceptibility to the flower came with an innate knowledge, an acceptance of the plasticity of our own minds - some idiosyncratic quality that readied us to connect in an etherscape beyond the material. Or, maybe it was some fanciful quirk of evolution, an unlikely mutation that persisted through the millennia, some chance play of chromosomes that left us disposed to the night flower's call. Whatever the mechanism, we were ripe for what came next.
When Nicotiana beckoned to me again in the early hours, I followed without hesitation. More people showed that second night - some Listeners, some not. And amid the tumult of tones, we began to recognize one another. The Hawker, the brawny Polish immigrant from the newsstand; Zero, the hipster from the morning train; Collette from the market, always in Birkenstocks and Bantu knots - I saw them all regularly in my day-to-day life. But through the Cat's music we were able see more - we were beautiful, unique and we stood apart from the ordinary. Ordinary had no place there. Ordinary went home.
That second night the Cat captivated us again. He hypnotized us, Pied-Pipered us - led us into a mesmerizing world newly winked into that then and there. He changed us from within, pulling notes out of overwound string to resonate within us. Eyes closed, he delivered sounds from that bass that defied earthly explanation. Blue notes balanced on edge and we plunged into a world between keys. Unstable tones sought consonance in our souls. It was euphoric, liberating. It was seductive. And we wanted more. The Jazz Cat, a trace of a smile on his lips, provided.
Away from the warehouse I lived the everyday. I went to the office, paid bills, put new tires on the car. But I engaged those activities with a new energy. And that change was perceived by strangers around me. No longer part of the background, I was noticed, seen, and treated with deference. And lack of sleep didn't plague me while pursuing Nicotiana; time ceased under the flower's spell.
On the morning train I eyed Zero, an unremarkable face in the past, now he, too, was subtly changed, latently sexual, strangely exotic. He gave up his seat to come stand next to me. His passage caused commuters to look up from their readers and cell phones without knowing why. By the simple act of walking, he sent ripples through their realities - ripples I could see spreading through them like rings from a pebble tossed into a pond. Zero saw them too.
"Ethan, yes?"
I smiled.
"Does the perfume come for you, too?" he asked.
"Yeah, but it's the music... it does something." We looked back at the other commuters. After just a handful of nights with the Cat, I could see what Zero saw. The basic connection between us was already working. When the ripples from Zero's movement dissipated, we could see our own overlapping bubbles of vibration separating us from everyone else.
"Best buzz I ever had." Zero laughed, before adding, "It's just one guy. One guy!"
"Can you imagine a band?"
The next night at the warehouse I could feel the other Listeners just as I had felt Zero on the train. Some of us stretched out our arms, touching the energy of the crowd through open palms and outstretched fingers. The vibrations of the group, novel and new, hummed in the air.
The Cat played and a baby grand rolled in - unnoticed! A pianist in a porkpie hat churned out flattened thirds and fifths, meandering around the Cat's beat and igniting a spray of spiraling sound we could see. The same with the drummer. I can't even say when he appeared. It was like he was always a part of the scene; we just had to think about him a while before we realized he had been there all along, laying down the beat that swirled around our feet. The changes felt natural, organic. They felt like... of course. We never questioned how, we only asked for more.
After about three months our numbers stabilized, and a name traveled through the crowd; Apex.
"Apex!" Liz chirped over the music as she pulled me from my chair.
"But what is it?" I asked, feeling the excitement of the group while we danced.
"Somebody."
"Who? What do they do?"
"I know I can't wait to find out!"
It was another three nights before Apex showed. We had almost dismissed him as fiction, a phantom of our overactive collective imagination. But he was real and every bit the predator. A shark in his element, he played a killer-chill sax. Calculating, confident, but unlike the Cat, there was nothing casual about Apex.
In his control that alto purred, sassed and in turn touched each of us. It teased, it taunted, it got personal. And we were sponges, soaking up the music, internalizing it. Sounds resonated within us, remapping us, wiring new synapses in and between our minds and then setting those newly formed pathways alight. The sax changed us irrevocably, fixing the connections between Listeners and preparing us to unleash the dormant potential of the whole. We now possessed the ability to exist as a single mind when gathered at the warehouse. Apex delivered that key.
Several nights later the miracles started.
"Can't go in like that," Zero urged. "Too uptight, man." He offered me a hit.
He was right. The everyday was getting more difficult, its noise and rhythmless pace often set my nerves ajar. I took the edge off and made myself ready for the evening. As we entered, Zero, chatting non-stop, caught a toe on the crude cement floor.
"This ain't right," he waved his arm. "This floor is all wrong for this place."
Then it changed. We connected and huge squares of polished terrazzo appeared under our feet. Just like Zero said it should. He described it like he could see it and then we all could see it, too. And then it was there. We laughed, amazed at our miracle, at what the collective could do. In the everyday that would have stopped me cold, but everyday stopped at the door. That night our minds began to grasp the child's play that was restructuring matter.
The Jazz Cat glanced over his spectacles and the music went on, adding new layers of complexity. Eager, we played with our new abilities. We changed the warehouse into a club. Terrazzo, tablecloths, lights, drugs, alcohol, food - whatever we wished. Anything that suggested itself to the collective could be brought into existence there. The pathways between our minds were complete and our abilities increased exponentially. Round, candlelit booths cradled friends in soft leather upholstery. Light shined cool on the band and red velvet drapes framed the stage, concealing theater wings and dressing rooms. Because we willed it, trees sprang up through the floor, immense luminescent leaves waving on a warm orange breeze, golden piano dew drops plinked onto the glittering floor. The walls glistened with sound and the graffiti writhed. It was fun, it was easy.
I no longer remember if it was by choice or design, but Listeners soon gravitated toward one another exclusively outside of the club. We developed an awareness of each other whether separated by blocks or miles. The feeling of connectedness quickly became basic to our nature and we shunned the one-dimensional coarseness of our old lives and relationships.
And at night, there was Jazz. Away from the curious eyes of the outside world, we were at home in the etherscape. And always there was the eclectic rhythm and patter of Jazz. My birthday came and the roof over our heads vaporized into a distant cloud while we drank wine under a magical Van Gogh sky.
But nothing prepared me for Gabriella.
She stepped easily from the shadows of pre-existence and took up the microphone, exuding the same casual exactitude as did the rest of the band. But unique from the others, she possessed voice. Scatting, she rampaged effortlessly around the exploits of the Cat and the band. She could instantly move from a rafter-rattling wail to a seductive undercurrent of whisper. The Jazz Cat was fascinating, Apex intense, but it was Gabriella who held me enthralled. The music now sizzled with the passion of her voice, or surged cool with confidence.
When the set was over she came to my table and smiled casually. Her skin the same caramel hue as the gown she wore, its chiffon hugged curves that were somehow familiar to me. "Hello Ethan," she said, and then leaned in and kissed me. In that kiss I knew her gentleness, her strengths and her weaknesses. I knew her completely, intimately. I knew the warmth of her breath at my ear, the softness of her caress. I knew her childlike marvel at echoes and her revulsion at anything cruel, and I remembered many times we spent hours after the Listeners disappeared, sitting on the stage together in the dark, exchanging the moments we each held most precious in our hearts. I felt my history re-written, memory by memory, in that kiss. Gabriella... of course.
Memories unfolded and I lived them for the first time. We huddled, laughing, in the recessed doorway of a Berlin flower shop to escape an afternoon downpour, tourist maps tented over our heads. Surrounded by the enticing smells of a Spanish restaurant, we dined on a terrace overlooking the sea, a wisp of crescent moon reflected in the waves. And the crisp fabric of Gabriella's summer dress falling away under my hands. In all my memories, there was always Gabriella. My Gabriella. Reality was as malleable as memory.
Day to day went on. I sat with Zero on the morning train, huddled nearer Dagmar in the coffee shop, grabbed a morning paper more often than I used to, lingering for a while with the Hawker. Physical proximity to other Listeners helped insulate us from the insult ordinary sound heaped upon us.
And when alone, I listened to more music than ever. Jazz, always jazz. It filled my head and my life and eased the crudeness of the everyday. At the club, beyond the harshness of the outside world, Listeners extolled the virtues of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. We discussed hexatonic scales and speculated on what intervening force could fashion a homeless seventeen-year-old into the venerated Ella. Or the cost that force might have exacted on the genius of Monk. Did they know Nicotiana? Or were they merely talented mortals?
I arrived home from work one day and felt something new, but oddly familiar upon opening the door. Gabriella was in the kitchen, James the cat, perched on the island countertop contentedly watching her prepare dinner. I didn't understand. Before that moment, she was always tied in time and place to the club, only untethered in my memories. Many times, in the early hours when the Jazz Cat and the band packed up, I would visit Gabriella in her dressing room, but it was there that I would leave her. And now she was in my apartment and I remembered that we had lived together for years.
We'd been listening for a little more than a year when the Boardroom Alpha first came in. Slim, graying temples, twill chinos and blue oxford shirt. Unlike other non-Listeners, he was difficult to spot and we did not immediately pick up on his presence. He was able to blend in. He didn't hesitate so he sent no vibrations through our consciousness, no disturbance. But eventually, one by one, we noticed him. We were curious. Somebody brought him a martini and hors d'oeuvres. He listened, drank, stayed in control and largely under our senses. He came back again the following Friday and caused even more of a stir. Non-Listeners never returned; such was their unease in our world. It was late in the evening when we felt the Boardroom Alpha's weakness - the fleeting disruption in his façade when he saw Shantay.
I was disappointed. The Alpha was ordinary after all. I couldn't tell his exact connection to her; I could only feel a momentary shift in his otherwise steady vibe. He quickly regained his composure, but I could tell Zero, Lanie and Collette felt the hesitation, too. And others I wasn't as close to, then everyone. An alertness passed through us. A sensation the Boardroom Alpha was not privy to.
Looking back, we should have pushed, but Shantay, stately and elegant, wasn't giving up any secrets. As a Listener, she had the ability to block off the parts of her mind she wanted to keep private. As Listeners, we respected her wishes. Although we had no access to her memories, we had no choice but to feel Shantay's distress and anger through our shared consciousness, emotions we were no longer accustomed to experiencing. We forgot how unpleasant some feelings could be. We had been re-mapped and we didn't have - didn't need - any means of dealing with discomforting emotions. Reflexively, we pushed backed against the source of our disquietude.
We made a rudimentary connection to the Boardroom Alpha, got inside him by focusing on his obsession with Shantay. Our pursuit of him was primal. He caused us pain; we wanted it to end. We picked through his mind, piece by piece, until we found how to rid ourselves of him. We learned was married, but unhappily so. Seduction a mere pleasant distraction. He was unscrupulous in business, crushing his rivals through either skill or deception. We searched until we found the things that he kept deeply hidden, the things he hid even from himself, and then we held the mirror for him to look upon what we found. Too late, he stopped coming to the club.
We learned who he was, and then, without looking deeper, we pulled the thread that would unravel him. We didn't see the sick child or the wife perpetually sad and exhausted, dependent on anti-depressants and alcohol. We didn't see his need. He began drinking more, but still gave the appearance of being in control. We knew better. We knew we set off a chain reaction that was running out of control in the Boardroom Alpha. And then we looked away. No longer a threat, he was no longer of interest.
Then we began to play, stretching the limits of our imaginations and abilities. Sea ice returned to Hudson Bay and everyone enjoyed a white Christmas. The Karoo sprouted green and it rained in the Sahara. Stray dogs took a break from breeding and pandas got to it. The Reading Girl in White and Yellow was left at a Rotterdam police station and a previously unknown Shakespeare play was discovered in a basement in Kent. Miracles were easy, they were fun, and they were no longer confined to the club.
Then the Boardroom Alpha stepped onto the third rail and we all felt the lightning jolt of it. I awoke on the bathroom floor of the apartment, a frantic Gabriella kneeling over me, screaming. "Ethan, what happened? What did you do!" A trickle of blood ran from my ear.
As we came to, Listeners rushed to the club. Wide-eyed and still shaking, we clutched each other, trying to glean comfort from the collective.
"Jeffrey," Shantay said, arms wrapped around herself as though warding off some chill we didn't feel. "That was his name."
"Shantay?" The Hawker voiced the confusion we each felt. Shantay stood before our eyes, face ashen and tear-streaked, but we couldn't feel her. Traumatized, she had withdrawn from us, somehow removed herself from our wiring.
"He's dead," she said.
I heard her words, already knew the information they conveyed, and didn't care. It was Shantay's withdrawal that left me in shocked horror. The Hawker put a comforting arm around her shoulders, tried to draw her close to his paternal hulk, but she pulled away from him. Then I felt the cascade of events to unfold with slow-motion clarity. I saw how we would tumble into the void Shantay opened, what one missing piece would do to us. I saw the inevitable, and then we all did.
In a panic I sought out each Listener, begging them to wait, to stay calm, react with logic rather than emotion. I wanted to alter a clockwork already in motion. No one listened. Everyone was scared, questioning their part in the Alpha's death. They retreated, built walls.
I told them we could make up for the Boardroom Alpha. Maybe we could even bring him back. At the very least, we could take care of his family, provide for them. Give them things to make them happy. We could make up for his death. I argued we had to stay connected so we could pay our debt to the Alpha's family.
But I couldn't hide my true motivation and that drove us farther apart, caused more separation. The buzz and energy of the collective was crumbling away, the Listeners morphing into uneasy shadows at the periphery of my awareness. Even as I made my arguments I was appalled at my obvious self-interest, my desperation. Was the life of a common womanizer really worth more than all we'd become? All we could do? But my true question, the one I wanted to hide, was obvious to all: Was the pain of mere humans more important than my pain at having to lose Gabriella?
We came apart. The club dissolved. The stage, the tables, a trillion dots of matter came unglued from each other, a quiet hissing as they fell to the cement in a haze of ozone before disappearing completely. Our collective mind, also, was gone - no more miracles. I was sickened at feeling the others slip away from me. I felt the Cat and Apex dissolve back into their shadowy world.
And Gabriella was gone.
I went mad with her disappearance. I blamed everyone; the Cat, Shantay, the Alpha, the Listeners. Myself. Zero moved in for a while, enduring my endless rage and self-pity, he tried to help me fill the void. By day I raged and threw things, any control I had, gone. My loss and pain made me unrecognizable even to myself. At night I cried in Zero's arms. We tried to revive the pace and patter of Jazz but such attempts were destined to fail. When he finally left, finding no relief and unable to absorb any more of the abuses I hurled at him, I was left alone and adrift, listlessly moving through the apartment like a ghost in my own life. I stopped at odd points, slumped to the floor, and remained motionless for hours, remembering her voice, her scent, her touch. Time lurched and stalled, carrying me along in its unpredictably convulsions. There was no separation between real memories and those created by tone and vibration - everything was real, Gabriella most of all. And she was gone.
I don't see the crowd anymore. Heard Cornell and Lanie split. Collette moved out of the country, the Hawker died after a stroke. Shantay drove her car into the river, ending herself there. Others did similar. Those of us left, scattered.
The broken connections are all still in my head - in everyone's I suppose - but pieces are missing and it stings like the raw nerves of a phantom limb. I struggle with the aloneness of this existence. Solitude is an unbearable emptiness after having been so alive and sharing so many vibrant voices. Some nights I still pursue the connections to the Listeners, but no one answers.
It's been decades since those days - since the Jazz Cat, whatever he was. I took an early retirement, unable to continue working. I travel now, minimalist travel in a tiny second-hand trailer. Mostly alone. Although I seek them out, relationships never last.
But some nights, even out here in Mojave, Nicotiana finds me. She enters with the breeze through the little side window, an unseen hand ruffling the curtains on clear moonless nights. She finds me in my bed, awake, but continues out across the desert sands without me.
I still can't make any sense of those days. Were we some cosmic experiment gone awry? Or a tale randomly hammered out on a monkey's typewriter?
It was years before my mind calmed enough to realize I felt no remorse for the Alpha. For Shantay, the others; Dagmar, Javi. That wasn't me before Jazz, before I was a Listener. I don't know if the others suffer this same deficit.
In a dream, I saw the Cat one last time outside the warehouse. It was dream-knowing that told me Apex and the band had already gone. The Cat was the last. He stopped before me but was looking at some distant point. The bass was locked away tight in its case. I touched his arm and he was warm and solid and I knew it was more than a dream. Wordlessly, he walked away, wheeling the base ahead of him into a sun that was setting somewhere beyond the end of the wharf. I stayed there until the sun dipped below the horizon. All trace of the Cat was gone and I stood alone, abandoned by the gods created in our image.
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"Jazz is restless. It won't stay put and it never will... Jazz is forever seeking and reaching out and exploring."
J.J. Johnson, 1924-2001
In the beginning there was the night-blooming Nicotiana. Before Gabriella; before Apex and the Jazz Cat; before the cool, cajoling just a little longer and the hours that slipped between minutes spent contemplating Thelonious. Before our numbers grew and we realized our strength; long before we sat as Olympians drunk on our own beauty and power, driven by a dissonance begging atonement - before any of that, there was the flower.
Nicotiana drifted into the night time city on a spectral breeze. The bewitching aroma crept over lawns, down alleyways and stole into houses and apartments until it found me in my bed and stirred me awake. Enchanted, I got up, dressed, and followed it out into the night. I left my safe neighborhood and journeyed down side streets I had no business taking - such was Nicotiana's spell. I passed under broken streetlights and by burned-out houses, gravel and broken glass crunching under the soles of my shoes. I crossed vacant lots and under roadways before emerging in the rows of warehouses lining the waterfront.
I wasn't the first to arrive. Cornell, Zero, Lanie, the Hawker - all strangers at the time - slipped before me into the warehouse through an alley-side door left ajar. About two dozen people came that first night, and like me, most clung to hipster roots in style and mind. We milled around the space, anticipating, somehow knowing even then that we were both on the cusp of and central to something new and unimagined.
Feeling the momentum of the group, I took stock of my surroundings. Graffiti covered the lower third of thirty-foot walls. Paint cans, rags, vape cartridges and needles littered the floor. As I remember it now, it was a makeshift riser that served as a stage set against the backdrop of an overhead door. Several tables and chairs were unaccountably strewn across the cement floor. It certainly didn't look the kind place where miracles would happen. It didn't look like much at all. But everything changed with the first whisperings of a standup bass. In unison, we all felt the tickle of those first notes and turned to acknowledge their origin.
The Jazz Cat came in unnoticed, seemingly materialized on the riser when we weren't looking. And he was cool. No other word to describe him - Cool. Round green shades rested mid-point on his nose, open vest over button-down shirt, dreads to his shoulders, and that beautiful, well-worn bass. Come from nowhere, he owned that stage. And he belonged to it. We felt it instantly. He was the Jazz Cat and he existed for us to exist for him. A strange symbiosis at work - or play. The Cat laid down a beat that was at once so easy and so intense that no one took notice of how the space around us changed. The Cat played, indifferent to the surroundings. He played because it was in him, because it was his nature to coax those strings according to some unseen score alive in his fingertips and soul.
But not everyone was a Listener. Some, confused as to why they were there, shifted around, nervous, not digging the vibe, not syncing with the tones. Even knowing the flower, some never did fit, and the music sifted them out, exposed them and sent them on their way. Nicotiana, maybe, took them back to their beds. In the morning the night just a barely remembered strange dream.
That first night I sat with Cornell and Lanie at a table pulled up front and we listened to the Cat conjure up pizzicato spells. "Ethan," I introduced myself. The air around us pulsed with sound.
"You play?" Cornell asked, passing me a cart.
"I listen."
"I play," he said, barely taking his eyes off the stage. "Lanie, too," He nodded at the pretty blonde with him. "Clarinet, a little sax. I tried the bass but it didn't take." He smiled in appreciation. "Dude is wicked-good." Thus, the Cat cast his spell and our worlds began anew with the buzz and slap of an unfretted bass, our lives previous being of little consequence.
Immersed in the sound, I was only starting to notice how the graffiti shifted, glowed a richer hue - a physical change beginning - when the music ended and everything went gray. Cat packed up. He was done for the evening. Time for us to follow the flower back to bed. And we did. That was how it began.
I never was particularly adamant about memories, realizing early on that the then was always imbued with the now. Did that make it easier to go where Nicotiana led? Perhaps susceptibility to the flower came with an innate knowledge, an acceptance of the plasticity of our own minds - some idiosyncratic quality that readied us to connect in an etherscape beyond the material. Or, maybe it was some fanciful quirk of evolution, an unlikely mutation that persisted through the millennia, some chance play of chromosomes that left us disposed to the night flower's call. Whatever the mechanism, we were ripe for what came next.
When Nicotiana beckoned to me again in the early hours, I followed without hesitation. More people showed that second night - some Listeners, some not. And amid the tumult of tones, we began to recognize one another. The Hawker, the brawny Polish immigrant from the newsstand; Zero, the hipster from the morning train; Collette from the market, always in Birkenstocks and Bantu knots - I saw them all regularly in my day-to-day life. But through the Cat's music we were able see more - we were beautiful, unique and we stood apart from the ordinary. Ordinary had no place there. Ordinary went home.
That second night the Cat captivated us again. He hypnotized us, Pied-Pipered us - led us into a mesmerizing world newly winked into that then and there. He changed us from within, pulling notes out of overwound string to resonate within us. Eyes closed, he delivered sounds from that bass that defied earthly explanation. Blue notes balanced on edge and we plunged into a world between keys. Unstable tones sought consonance in our souls. It was euphoric, liberating. It was seductive. And we wanted more. The Jazz Cat, a trace of a smile on his lips, provided.
Away from the warehouse I lived the everyday. I went to the office, paid bills, put new tires on the car. But I engaged those activities with a new energy. And that change was perceived by strangers around me. No longer part of the background, I was noticed, seen, and treated with deference. And lack of sleep didn't plague me while pursuing Nicotiana; time ceased under the flower's spell.
On the morning train I eyed Zero, an unremarkable face in the past, now he, too, was subtly changed, latently sexual, strangely exotic. He gave up his seat to come stand next to me. His passage caused commuters to look up from their readers and cell phones without knowing why. By the simple act of walking, he sent ripples through their realities - ripples I could see spreading through them like rings from a pebble tossed into a pond. Zero saw them too.
"Ethan, yes?"
I smiled.
"Does the perfume come for you, too?" he asked.
"Yeah, but it's the music... it does something." We looked back at the other commuters. After just a handful of nights with the Cat, I could see what Zero saw. The basic connection between us was already working. When the ripples from Zero's movement dissipated, we could see our own overlapping bubbles of vibration separating us from everyone else.
"Best buzz I ever had." Zero laughed, before adding, "It's just one guy. One guy!"
"Can you imagine a band?"
The next night at the warehouse I could feel the other Listeners just as I had felt Zero on the train. Some of us stretched out our arms, touching the energy of the crowd through open palms and outstretched fingers. The vibrations of the group, novel and new, hummed in the air.
The Cat played and a baby grand rolled in - unnoticed! A pianist in a porkpie hat churned out flattened thirds and fifths, meandering around the Cat's beat and igniting a spray of spiraling sound we could see. The same with the drummer. I can't even say when he appeared. It was like he was always a part of the scene; we just had to think about him a while before we realized he had been there all along, laying down the beat that swirled around our feet. The changes felt natural, organic. They felt like... of course. We never questioned how, we only asked for more.
After about three months our numbers stabilized, and a name traveled through the crowd; Apex.
"Apex!" Liz chirped over the music as she pulled me from my chair.
"But what is it?" I asked, feeling the excitement of the group while we danced.
"Somebody."
"Who? What do they do?"
"I know I can't wait to find out!"
It was another three nights before Apex showed. We had almost dismissed him as fiction, a phantom of our overactive collective imagination. But he was real and every bit the predator. A shark in his element, he played a killer-chill sax. Calculating, confident, but unlike the Cat, there was nothing casual about Apex.
In his control that alto purred, sassed and in turn touched each of us. It teased, it taunted, it got personal. And we were sponges, soaking up the music, internalizing it. Sounds resonated within us, remapping us, wiring new synapses in and between our minds and then setting those newly formed pathways alight. The sax changed us irrevocably, fixing the connections between Listeners and preparing us to unleash the dormant potential of the whole. We now possessed the ability to exist as a single mind when gathered at the warehouse. Apex delivered that key.
Several nights later the miracles started.
"Can't go in like that," Zero urged. "Too uptight, man." He offered me a hit.
He was right. The everyday was getting more difficult, its noise and rhythmless pace often set my nerves ajar. I took the edge off and made myself ready for the evening. As we entered, Zero, chatting non-stop, caught a toe on the crude cement floor.
"This ain't right," he waved his arm. "This floor is all wrong for this place."
Then it changed. We connected and huge squares of polished terrazzo appeared under our feet. Just like Zero said it should. He described it like he could see it and then we all could see it, too. And then it was there. We laughed, amazed at our miracle, at what the collective could do. In the everyday that would have stopped me cold, but everyday stopped at the door. That night our minds began to grasp the child's play that was restructuring matter.
The Jazz Cat glanced over his spectacles and the music went on, adding new layers of complexity. Eager, we played with our new abilities. We changed the warehouse into a club. Terrazzo, tablecloths, lights, drugs, alcohol, food - whatever we wished. Anything that suggested itself to the collective could be brought into existence there. The pathways between our minds were complete and our abilities increased exponentially. Round, candlelit booths cradled friends in soft leather upholstery. Light shined cool on the band and red velvet drapes framed the stage, concealing theater wings and dressing rooms. Because we willed it, trees sprang up through the floor, immense luminescent leaves waving on a warm orange breeze, golden piano dew drops plinked onto the glittering floor. The walls glistened with sound and the graffiti writhed. It was fun, it was easy.
I no longer remember if it was by choice or design, but Listeners soon gravitated toward one another exclusively outside of the club. We developed an awareness of each other whether separated by blocks or miles. The feeling of connectedness quickly became basic to our nature and we shunned the one-dimensional coarseness of our old lives and relationships.
And at night, there was Jazz. Away from the curious eyes of the outside world, we were at home in the etherscape. And always there was the eclectic rhythm and patter of Jazz. My birthday came and the roof over our heads vaporized into a distant cloud while we drank wine under a magical Van Gogh sky.
But nothing prepared me for Gabriella.
She stepped easily from the shadows of pre-existence and took up the microphone, exuding the same casual exactitude as did the rest of the band. But unique from the others, she possessed voice. Scatting, she rampaged effortlessly around the exploits of the Cat and the band. She could instantly move from a rafter-rattling wail to a seductive undercurrent of whisper. The Jazz Cat was fascinating, Apex intense, but it was Gabriella who held me enthralled. The music now sizzled with the passion of her voice, or surged cool with confidence.
When the set was over she came to my table and smiled casually. Her skin the same caramel hue as the gown she wore, its chiffon hugged curves that were somehow familiar to me. "Hello Ethan," she said, and then leaned in and kissed me. In that kiss I knew her gentleness, her strengths and her weaknesses. I knew her completely, intimately. I knew the warmth of her breath at my ear, the softness of her caress. I knew her childlike marvel at echoes and her revulsion at anything cruel, and I remembered many times we spent hours after the Listeners disappeared, sitting on the stage together in the dark, exchanging the moments we each held most precious in our hearts. I felt my history re-written, memory by memory, in that kiss. Gabriella... of course.
Memories unfolded and I lived them for the first time. We huddled, laughing, in the recessed doorway of a Berlin flower shop to escape an afternoon downpour, tourist maps tented over our heads. Surrounded by the enticing smells of a Spanish restaurant, we dined on a terrace overlooking the sea, a wisp of crescent moon reflected in the waves. And the crisp fabric of Gabriella's summer dress falling away under my hands. In all my memories, there was always Gabriella. My Gabriella. Reality was as malleable as memory.
Day to day went on. I sat with Zero on the morning train, huddled nearer Dagmar in the coffee shop, grabbed a morning paper more often than I used to, lingering for a while with the Hawker. Physical proximity to other Listeners helped insulate us from the insult ordinary sound heaped upon us.
And when alone, I listened to more music than ever. Jazz, always jazz. It filled my head and my life and eased the crudeness of the everyday. At the club, beyond the harshness of the outside world, Listeners extolled the virtues of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. We discussed hexatonic scales and speculated on what intervening force could fashion a homeless seventeen-year-old into the venerated Ella. Or the cost that force might have exacted on the genius of Monk. Did they know Nicotiana? Or were they merely talented mortals?
I arrived home from work one day and felt something new, but oddly familiar upon opening the door. Gabriella was in the kitchen, James the cat, perched on the island countertop contentedly watching her prepare dinner. I didn't understand. Before that moment, she was always tied in time and place to the club, only untethered in my memories. Many times, in the early hours when the Jazz Cat and the band packed up, I would visit Gabriella in her dressing room, but it was there that I would leave her. And now she was in my apartment and I remembered that we had lived together for years.
We'd been listening for a little more than a year when the Boardroom Alpha first came in. Slim, graying temples, twill chinos and blue oxford shirt. Unlike other non-Listeners, he was difficult to spot and we did not immediately pick up on his presence. He was able to blend in. He didn't hesitate so he sent no vibrations through our consciousness, no disturbance. But eventually, one by one, we noticed him. We were curious. Somebody brought him a martini and hors d'oeuvres. He listened, drank, stayed in control and largely under our senses. He came back again the following Friday and caused even more of a stir. Non-Listeners never returned; such was their unease in our world. It was late in the evening when we felt the Boardroom Alpha's weakness - the fleeting disruption in his façade when he saw Shantay.
I was disappointed. The Alpha was ordinary after all. I couldn't tell his exact connection to her; I could only feel a momentary shift in his otherwise steady vibe. He quickly regained his composure, but I could tell Zero, Lanie and Collette felt the hesitation, too. And others I wasn't as close to, then everyone. An alertness passed through us. A sensation the Boardroom Alpha was not privy to.
Looking back, we should have pushed, but Shantay, stately and elegant, wasn't giving up any secrets. As a Listener, she had the ability to block off the parts of her mind she wanted to keep private. As Listeners, we respected her wishes. Although we had no access to her memories, we had no choice but to feel Shantay's distress and anger through our shared consciousness, emotions we were no longer accustomed to experiencing. We forgot how unpleasant some feelings could be. We had been re-mapped and we didn't have - didn't need - any means of dealing with discomforting emotions. Reflexively, we pushed backed against the source of our disquietude.
We made a rudimentary connection to the Boardroom Alpha, got inside him by focusing on his obsession with Shantay. Our pursuit of him was primal. He caused us pain; we wanted it to end. We picked through his mind, piece by piece, until we found how to rid ourselves of him. We learned was married, but unhappily so. Seduction a mere pleasant distraction. He was unscrupulous in business, crushing his rivals through either skill or deception. We searched until we found the things that he kept deeply hidden, the things he hid even from himself, and then we held the mirror for him to look upon what we found. Too late, he stopped coming to the club.
We learned who he was, and then, without looking deeper, we pulled the thread that would unravel him. We didn't see the sick child or the wife perpetually sad and exhausted, dependent on anti-depressants and alcohol. We didn't see his need. He began drinking more, but still gave the appearance of being in control. We knew better. We knew we set off a chain reaction that was running out of control in the Boardroom Alpha. And then we looked away. No longer a threat, he was no longer of interest.
Then we began to play, stretching the limits of our imaginations and abilities. Sea ice returned to Hudson Bay and everyone enjoyed a white Christmas. The Karoo sprouted green and it rained in the Sahara. Stray dogs took a break from breeding and pandas got to it. The Reading Girl in White and Yellow was left at a Rotterdam police station and a previously unknown Shakespeare play was discovered in a basement in Kent. Miracles were easy, they were fun, and they were no longer confined to the club.
Then the Boardroom Alpha stepped onto the third rail and we all felt the lightning jolt of it. I awoke on the bathroom floor of the apartment, a frantic Gabriella kneeling over me, screaming. "Ethan, what happened? What did you do!" A trickle of blood ran from my ear.
As we came to, Listeners rushed to the club. Wide-eyed and still shaking, we clutched each other, trying to glean comfort from the collective.
"Jeffrey," Shantay said, arms wrapped around herself as though warding off some chill we didn't feel. "That was his name."
"Shantay?" The Hawker voiced the confusion we each felt. Shantay stood before our eyes, face ashen and tear-streaked, but we couldn't feel her. Traumatized, she had withdrawn from us, somehow removed herself from our wiring.
"He's dead," she said.
I heard her words, already knew the information they conveyed, and didn't care. It was Shantay's withdrawal that left me in shocked horror. The Hawker put a comforting arm around her shoulders, tried to draw her close to his paternal hulk, but she pulled away from him. Then I felt the cascade of events to unfold with slow-motion clarity. I saw how we would tumble into the void Shantay opened, what one missing piece would do to us. I saw the inevitable, and then we all did.
In a panic I sought out each Listener, begging them to wait, to stay calm, react with logic rather than emotion. I wanted to alter a clockwork already in motion. No one listened. Everyone was scared, questioning their part in the Alpha's death. They retreated, built walls.
I told them we could make up for the Boardroom Alpha. Maybe we could even bring him back. At the very least, we could take care of his family, provide for them. Give them things to make them happy. We could make up for his death. I argued we had to stay connected so we could pay our debt to the Alpha's family.
But I couldn't hide my true motivation and that drove us farther apart, caused more separation. The buzz and energy of the collective was crumbling away, the Listeners morphing into uneasy shadows at the periphery of my awareness. Even as I made my arguments I was appalled at my obvious self-interest, my desperation. Was the life of a common womanizer really worth more than all we'd become? All we could do? But my true question, the one I wanted to hide, was obvious to all: Was the pain of mere humans more important than my pain at having to lose Gabriella?
We came apart. The club dissolved. The stage, the tables, a trillion dots of matter came unglued from each other, a quiet hissing as they fell to the cement in a haze of ozone before disappearing completely. Our collective mind, also, was gone - no more miracles. I was sickened at feeling the others slip away from me. I felt the Cat and Apex dissolve back into their shadowy world.
And Gabriella was gone.
I went mad with her disappearance. I blamed everyone; the Cat, Shantay, the Alpha, the Listeners. Myself. Zero moved in for a while, enduring my endless rage and self-pity, he tried to help me fill the void. By day I raged and threw things, any control I had, gone. My loss and pain made me unrecognizable even to myself. At night I cried in Zero's arms. We tried to revive the pace and patter of Jazz but such attempts were destined to fail. When he finally left, finding no relief and unable to absorb any more of the abuses I hurled at him, I was left alone and adrift, listlessly moving through the apartment like a ghost in my own life. I stopped at odd points, slumped to the floor, and remained motionless for hours, remembering her voice, her scent, her touch. Time lurched and stalled, carrying me along in its unpredictably convulsions. There was no separation between real memories and those created by tone and vibration - everything was real, Gabriella most of all. And she was gone.
I don't see the crowd anymore. Heard Cornell and Lanie split. Collette moved out of the country, the Hawker died after a stroke. Shantay drove her car into the river, ending herself there. Others did similar. Those of us left, scattered.
The broken connections are all still in my head - in everyone's I suppose - but pieces are missing and it stings like the raw nerves of a phantom limb. I struggle with the aloneness of this existence. Solitude is an unbearable emptiness after having been so alive and sharing so many vibrant voices. Some nights I still pursue the connections to the Listeners, but no one answers.
It's been decades since those days - since the Jazz Cat, whatever he was. I took an early retirement, unable to continue working. I travel now, minimalist travel in a tiny second-hand trailer. Mostly alone. Although I seek them out, relationships never last.
But some nights, even out here in Mojave, Nicotiana finds me. She enters with the breeze through the little side window, an unseen hand ruffling the curtains on clear moonless nights. She finds me in my bed, awake, but continues out across the desert sands without me.
I still can't make any sense of those days. Were we some cosmic experiment gone awry? Or a tale randomly hammered out on a monkey's typewriter?
It was years before my mind calmed enough to realize I felt no remorse for the Alpha. For Shantay, the others; Dagmar, Javi. That wasn't me before Jazz, before I was a Listener. I don't know if the others suffer this same deficit.
In a dream, I saw the Cat one last time outside the warehouse. It was dream-knowing that told me Apex and the band had already gone. The Cat was the last. He stopped before me but was looking at some distant point. The bass was locked away tight in its case. I touched his arm and he was warm and solid and I knew it was more than a dream. Wordlessly, he walked away, wheeling the base ahead of him into a sun that was setting somewhere beyond the end of the wharf. I stayed there until the sun dipped below the horizon. All trace of the Cat was gone and I stood alone, abandoned by the gods created in our image.
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